October 2026
Amid all the talk of AI and tech jobs, here's a quieter truth from the workforce data: some of the biggest growth is in caring for people. Nursing, social work, counselling – roles built on human connection – are set to grow strongly. As machines take the routine work, human warmth becomes more valuable, not less.
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October 2026
AI produces fluent, confident, professional-looking answers – and it's wrong a lot of the time. Most teachers already worry that students can't tell the difference. That gap is going to make one old-fashioned skill more valuable than almost any other: the ability to think critically about what you're being told.
4 min readRead articleOctober 2026
Vocational education, entrepreneurship and accessibility rarely get grouped together, but they share the same live question right now: what happens to a field built on hands-on judgement and lived experience when a tool can fake the appearance of both?
4 min readRead articleOctober 2026
Notes from UNESCO's first thematic consultation feeding its Education Beyond 2030 process. The message from the keynote speakers was blunt: for millions of learners uncertainty is already the reality, and the system in place before a crisis may already have been excluding children.
4 min readRead articleAbout the Author
Paul Penfold is an education and technology consultant based in Chiang Mai, Thailand, with six decades of experience spanning classroom teaching, academic research, government policy, and humanitarian service. He advises schools, ministries, and EdTech companies on AI in education, alternative education, and learning technology, and has published 37 papers on immersive and virtual-world learning. His career includes refugee education on the Thai-Cambodian border, pioneering virtual-world hospitality education at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and national tourism HR strategies across Asia and the Caribbean.
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